COLUMN ONE : Longtime allies--the U.S., Germany and Japan--are drifting apart. As economic, political and military issues grow more important, old friendships are tested.

They stood together as allies through 40 years of Cold War, but the United States, Germany and Japan are now discovering that the conflicts that divide them are growing as strong as the common concerns that once bound them together.

On issue after critical issue, from the nature of the new world order to the bruising economic competition that will dominate the 1990s, the world’s new Big Three find themselves increasingly at odds.

Brent Scowcroft, President Bush’s national security adviser, calls the phenomenon “West-West conflict” and warns that the tensions will worsen unless allied leaders act.

“It’s a turbulent period. And what is being worked out right now, how it is worked out, will go a long way to set the foundation of the future relationships,” Scowcroft said in an interview.

“It’s too early to say whether there’s an inherent tendency (for the allies) to drift apart,” he said. “But I think one of the major issues that we’re facing right now is: Can we maintain and develop an open world trading system, or are we going to break down into regional trading blocs? And while I think politically the trilateral relationships are in pretty good shape, I’m not sure how well they would sustain a collapse economically.”

In the worst-case scenarios of some geostrategists, the Big Three could divide the world into three partially closed trading blocs--and, in time, into three antagonistic political blocs as well.

Max Kohnstamm, a former aide to the visionary European leader Jean Monnet, suggested that the unpredictability of the current period makes it, in some ways, even riskier than the Cold War. “When I was a boy in Holland,” he says, “we were always taught that the greatest danger comes not with the freeze, but with the thaw.”

The old allies’ new conflicts include political, economic and military issues:

* They disagree over the vital issue of aid to the former Soviet Union. German officials complain bitterly that the Bush Administration has not moved fast enough, while Japan bristles at Western pressure to move faster.

* They continue to quarrel over the ground rules of world trade, delaying completion of a new global trade pact despite their own leaders’ warnings that failure could lead to a destructive outburst of protectionism.

* They bicker over who should bear the burden of lifting their three economies out of recession. Both Germany and Japan have rebuffed American appeals to lower their interest rates to stimulate growth throughout the world.

* They cross each other on critical political issues. Germany and the United States have pursued contradictory policies toward the crisis in Yugoslavia; Japan rebuffed American and European efforts to maintain even mild human rights sanctions against China.

* They are increasingly at odds on issues of military security. In the Persian Gulf War, both Germany and Japan refused to send noncombat troops to support the U.S.-led military action. And Germany has alarmed the Bush Administration by joining France to build a new European military force that excludes the United States.

As a result, the annual summit meetings of the world’s largest industrial democracies--the Group of Seven, dominated by the United States, Japan and the European Community, including Germany--are no longer the celebrations of solidarity and resolve they used to be.

This year’s meeting, planned for July in Munich, Germany, was supposed to seal a deal on trade negotiations--but instead may focus on another round of recriminations over who is responsible for the breakdown of the talks.

The increasing friction among the Big Three doesn’t mean they are headed toward open conflict, much less a replay of World War II. But it does mean that they have lost a sense of shared purpose--that they define their national interests in different ways now.

And, most discomforting to Americans, it means that the United States’ strongest military allies are also its toughest economic competitors--and, as a result, no longer as willing to follow Washington’s lead on political issues.

“Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Europeans and the Japanese have less need of the United States than they did before,” said former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger. “Their willingness to defer (to the United States) in the way we came to expect in the postwar period will inevitably lessen.”

Morton Abramowitz, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, adds: “On the things that matter now--trade, economics and monetary affairs--the Germans and the Japanese are going to count. The American ability to call the tune becomes a lot less.”

Roles in Cold War Struggle

For 45 years after World War II, American policy-makers were preoccupied with the global struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, between capitalism and communism. One of the principal aims of American foreign policy was to support Germany and Japan as front-line states against the Soviets.

The United States helped the two former Axis powers rebuild after World War II, and saw the German and Japanese economic miracles as symbols of American success.

Now, with the Cold War ended and Americans increasingly concerned about their economic future, all that has changed, and with it, the strategic map of the world.

Japan and Germany remain American allies. But as a reunified Germany comes to dominate Europe and as an ever-richer Japan exerts economic muscle in Asia and beyond, the United States finds itself in direct competition with these regional superpowers.

The new atmosphere of “West-West conflict” is most evident in the fields of trade and economics. Americans spar with Japan over cars, auto parts, interlocking Japanese corporations and access to the Japanese market. The United States feuds with Germany over interest rates and European Community farm subsidies. German officials warn of the Japanese “threat” to German industries.

Senior U.S. officials say they fear that these economic frictions could become much worse if the current round of international trade talks breaks down and the world is carved up into regional trade blocs.

By regional blocs, they mean a division of the world trading system into the European Community, a U.S.-led North American area with Canada and Mexico, and some Japan-led trade grouping within Asia. In each case, countries would find it much easier to trade with other nations inside the bloc than with countries outside.

Some analysts believe that the breakup of the world into trade blocs is on the way--or, indeed, already here. “I don’t have any doubt anymore that economic regionalism is the post-Cold War new world order,” said Prof. Chalmers A. Johnson of UC San Diego. The current international trade system “is dead,” he said. “What killed it off was the fact that the Cold War is over.”

A Western diplomat confirmed that the current round of trade talks has failed, in practical terms. “But no one will admit it publicly,” he said. “We’ll come up with some formula, like extending the negotiations, so no one is forced to admit that we’ve failed.”

Global Free-Trade System

Most experts see a future that is not so bleak. They insist that some form of global free-trade system will survive because Japan, the United States and Germany will all decide to save it--in their own interest. “I think (the Japanese) understand that if the world organizes in regional terms, they are the ones who lose, because they have a global economy,” a senior State Department official observed.

Nevertheless, the economic rivalry is growing ever sharper. In a telling sign of the new realities for U.S. foreign policy, the State Department has told its ambassadors around the world to give top priority to helping American business. For decades, American diplomats worried about the growing influence of the Soviet Union or China; now they monitor the growing clout of Germany and Japan.

In Indonesia, for example, the U.S. Embassy once gave its top priority to blocking any Soviet military or political threat to Southeast Asia. But since 1989, the American mission’s overriding concern has been to help AT&T; beat the Japanese competition for a communications contract.

“It was a head-to-head competition between Japanese and American firms,” explained a State Department official. “We squawked about what we thought was a wired deal with Japan.” In the end, Indonesia gave its business to both American and Japanese firms.

Bush provided a dramatic symbol of the new economic focus on his trip to Japan last January, when he took a delegation of American business leaders with him. That was a rarity for a modern American President--but it brought the United States in line with other countries, like Germany, whose leaders regularly take executives from their biggest corporations on overseas travel.

The effect was jarring. For the first time in recent memory, a presidential trip focused not on America’s military might but on its economic problems.

“That trip could be a watershed,” said Michael Vlahos of the Center for Naval Analyses. “The Japanese will never see the United States as their leader again.”

Other top Administration officials have served notice that the United States would like Japan to play a more active role around the world--not just by donating money but also by contributing personnel for such missions as international peacekeeping operations.

“Your ‘checkbook diplomacy,’ like our ‘dollar diplomacy’ of an earlier era, is clearly too narrow,” Secretary of State James A. Baker III said on a trip to Tokyo last November.

Yet American officials admit that as Japan and Germany become more assertive in developing their own, independent foreign policies, they may come into conflict with the United States.

“We’ve been encouraging the Japanese for 30 years to come up with a foreign policy,” said one State Department official. “Now they will. And we’re not going to like it.”

Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger made the same point about Germany and the European Community. “In the years ahead, Europe will not find the need for U.S. protection so compelling,” he wrote recently. “The United States will not sacrifice as much for European security. In due course, Germany will insist on the political influence to which its power entitles it.”

Indeed, both Germany and Japan have quietly made it clear that they expect, in due course, to occupy permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council--alongside the victors of World War II (the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China).

Foreign Policy Disputes

Those new realities of power have already produced significant foreign policy disputes.

Beginning in 1990, while the United States and European countries were seeking to hold up international loans and high-level official visits to China after the Beijing massacre, Japan broke ranks and restored contacts with the Chinese leadership.

Similarly, a top Japanese political leader, Shin Kanemaru, traveled to North Korea and suggested the possibility of a dramatic improvement in relations at a time when the United States was pressing North Korea to halt a nuclear weapons program.

Japan has so far avoided undercutting the Administration’s go-slow approach toward normalization of relations with Vietnam. But Tokyo has made it clear it would like to begin doing business in Vietnam and wants the United States to lift its trade embargo and normalize relations with Hanoi as soon as possible.

U.S.-German tensions have been painfully evident during the crisis in Yugoslavia. Germany broke with the United States--and demonstrated its clout in Europe--by pushing the EC into recognizing Croatia and Slovenia as independent from Yugoslavia. Chancellor Helmut Kohl reacted to American criticism by declaring the move “a success for German foreign policy.” Now, Washington is chiding Europe for doing too little to halt the bloodshed in Yugoslavia.

Kohl broke with another American policy by meeting publicly with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, ostracized by most countries for his Nazi past.

On another key issue, European defense, Germany has joined with France in building a 35,000-man “Euro Corps” designed as the nucleus of a new, exclusively European army. The Bush Administration protested the plan in a series of furious diplomatic messages last year and has warned the Europeans that their scheme could weaken the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

On aid to Russia, the Big Three have been out of step since 1990, when a newly reunited Germany agreed to aid the Soviet Union as the price of the Red Army’s withdrawal from East Berlin. For most of last year, Germany asked the United States and Japan to shoulder more of the burden; the Bush Administration eventually agreed, but Japan is still resisting.

Global vs. Regional Power

In all these cases, there is another point of friction between the United States and its allies: America is still playing the role of a global power, while Germany and Japan remain regional ones. The Bush Administration vies for influence in both Asia and Europe. By contrast, Japan worries little about what happens in distant European countries like Yugoslavia, and Germany plays no major role in diplomacy over Asian issues like the North Korean nuclear program.

Reflecting that regionalism, Japan and Germany have had far less interaction with one another than both have had with the United States--perhaps because of the fear of reviving memories of the old World War II Axis alliance.

When then-German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher visited Tokyo last February, it was his first trip to Japan in almost six years.

But both German and Japanese officials said it was time to work together more closely. They agreed to begin holding meetings of their foreign ministers every six months. And Tokyo has applied for observer status in the 52-country Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the largest European diplomatic forum.

These small moves toward greater contact reflect a large increase in self-confidence--a phenomenon with profound implications for the United States.

“If you look at Japanese or even German history over the past 150 years, there’s been a strain of searching for international acceptance,” said one State Department specialist on Japan. Now, he said, “there’s much less patience with being given a seat in the back row, particularly since they’re paying more and more of the dough for these things. They (Japan and Germany) want a full front seat.”

How the Rivals Stack Up

After four decades as staunch military and economic allies, Germany, Japan and the United States now are finding that their differences are running as deep as their common interests. On a statistical level, just how much alike and how dissimilar are the Big Three nations? Here are some measures:

Population

Germany Japan U.S. Total 78.64 million* 123.12 million 248.76 million Per square kilometer 249 326 27 Net average increase 0.1% 0.6% 1.0% in previous 10 years

* 1991 estimate Economy

Germany Japan U.S. Per capita output $19,182 $23,305 $20,629 Per capita output $14,985 $15,712 $20,629 adjusted for purchasing power

Living standards

Germany Japan U.S. Passenger cars per 1,000 people 457 241 559 Telephones per 1,000 people 650 555 (1985) 650 (1984) Televisions per 1,000 people 379 585 813 Doctors per 1,000 people 3.0 1.6 (1988) 2.3 (1988) Infant mortality per 7.5 4.6 9.7 1,000 live births

Wages and prices

Germany Japan U.S. Annual wage increases 4.1% 3.3% 2.7% in previous five years Annual consumer price increases 1.3% 1.1% 3.6% in the past five years

Civilian employment

Germany Japan U.S. Total 27.21 million 61.28 million 117.34 million Agriculture 3.7% 7.6% 2.9% Industry 39.8% 34.3% 26.7% Services 56.5% 58.2% 70.5%

Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Based on most recent available comparisons. 1989 figures, unless otherwise stated.